Viking Thunder Slot Machine

If you’re fed up with the variance of online video slots and want to put fortune back into your own hands, you’ll love what Cayetano Gaming have done with their innovative title, Viking Thunder.

Unlike other games where players are reliant on fortuitous spins to boost their bankroll, Viking Thunder actually lets you choose how many wilds you want to be present on the gameboard each turn, allowing you to customise the slot’s reels to create a level of variance you’re comfortable with.

Naturally, this option comes with a hefty price if you go overboard with the number of wilds you choose to lock in place, but adding one here or there won’t cost you a fortune and could result in some tidy bonus wins. Read on to find out more about how this exciting feature works in practice.

Pillage and Plunder

While the customisable wilds are certainly something we’ve not witnessed before, beyond this feature Viking Thunder is actually an incredibly straightforward title to play. Like other Cayetano games, the slot features 5 reels and 10 fixed paylines, meaning players only need concern themselves with their total bet each spin – with limits of £0.10 to £200 providing plenty of scope.

Each wild that you choose to add to the gameboard will increase your total stake, with the first just over doubling your bet and every subsequent symbol becoming progressively more expensive. As such, it is important not to go overboard with the number of wilds that you select – after all, if you make all 15 spaces wild before a spin, you’ll be risking 999x your stake to win a maximum of 900x.

With that number representing Viking Thunder’s maximum payout award, smaller prizes of 0.5x-4x your bet are on offer for the various three-of-a-kind combinations, with bigger wins available for matching four or more consecutive symbols on any of the game’s 10 regular paylines.

There’s a Storm Coming

Visually speaking, Viking Thunder draws on the iconography of Norse legends and features an entirely unique cast of symbols on its reels. This means the conventional playing card symbols are dropped in favour of a selection of brightly coloured gems, with higher value icons including a bag of coins, Thor’s hammer, a Viking warrior and the Valkyrie symbol that acts as the slot’s substitute wild.

When a player chooses to turn one of the symbols into a wild at the start of a new spin, a bolt of lightning hits the gameboard to transform their chosen space into a Valkyrie icon, while all winning paylines are celebrated with a short animation that is unique to each specific symbol. Further storm elements are sometimes added at the end of a spin, when two random bonuses can be awarded.

While this means that Viking Thunder packs a pretty decent visual punch, it must be said that the game is fairly basic when it comes to audio, with no music present unless the reels are spinning. Rumbling thunder also features when a bonus is activated, but aside from that it is a quiet game.

Electrifying Bonuses

While the choose-a-wild facility is the main bonus aspect of Viking Thunder, the slot does also include two randomly-triggered features. Occurring at the end of a spin, the gameboard will sometimes fall into darkness to denote the coming storm, with one of three things then happening.

More often than not the storm passes with no effect and players continue as normal, but every now and then Thor’s hammer will crash into the gameboard and award an instant prize of up to 50x your stake. Additionally, Viking Thunder will occasionally dole out up to 12 free spins, with all wilds that are currently present on the reels remaining in place throughout at no additional cost to players.

Although these features can create some very profitable scenarios, the fact that they are randomly triggered limits their impact somewhat and means that players will mostly be reliant on shrewd use of the wild feature to secure the best prizes – although this can come at a high cost to your bankroll.

Bolt from the Blue?

With its innovative custom wild feature, Viking Thunder is certainly a slot that will appeal to players seeking to take control of their fortunes and not be so reliant on god-like lucky streaks. Although packing the board with the maximum number of wilds will play havoc with your bankroll, using this feature wisely can create a number of winning combinations and significantly reduce your variance.